Editor’s Note

Each of the articles presented in this volume explore how dance frames, generates, and interrogates human relationships, emphasizing community, vulnerability, interdependence, and the embodied negotiation of social power.Across disparate cultural and political contexts-Mexican migrant communities, Asian American ballroom dancers in New York, activists commemorating migrant deaths on the U.S.-Mexico border, and contemporary intermedia collaborations drawing from butoh and Surrealism-the essays collectively highlight how dance becomes a site for rethinking belonging, grief, racial and gender hierarchies, and the boundaries of the human body itself.While stylistically diverse, the works converge on the idea that movement is not merely aesthetic expression but a relational practice shaped by histories of displacement, structural violence, and the persistent human desire for connection.The opening essay, Michelle Castaeda's "Danzantes del Alba: Dance, Textile, and the Communitarian Weave," offers an extended analysis of Danzantes del Alba, a project created by Teatro Lnea de Sombra (TLS) in collaboration with migrant shelters and textile collectives.Castaeda argues that this work is not simply a performance but an enactment of what she calls a "communitarian weave"a material and relational fabric that sustains collective life in the face of capitalist extraction, migration, and the erosion of traditional communal practices.Drawing on Marx's critique of enclosure, she explains that capitalism destroys not only shared physical resources but also "commons-sense": the memory and knowledge required for communal forms of living.Danzantes del Alba responds to this destruction through its mobilization of dance, textile work, and collaborative processes that reconstruct social bonds.The project began in 2016 in Tenosique, Mexico, when migrants residing at the shelter La 72 participated in a carnival comparsa wearing makeshift Loco de la Danza costumes assembled from discarded clothing.Their presence in public parade space temporarily transformed them from criminalized figures into celebrants with agency and visibility.This event initiated a long-term artistic and ethnographic partnership that resulted in 36 intricate costumes composed of thousands of stitched-together fabric retazos.These garments were made by women's cooperatives and LGBTQ + collectives whose collaborative labor TLS describes as "wasting time"-a deliberate, slow, relational practice that privileges mutual care over capitalist speed and productivity.Castaeda situates these textiles within Mexico's long history of displacement of subsistence workers, the exploitation of garment labor, and the colonial transformation of Indigenous dance practices.Whereas state folklorization sanitized agrarian dances into mere cultural displays, Danzantes del Alba reconnects dance to communal reproduction, textile labor, and cosmological relationalities.Through its emphasis on material density, collaboration, and interdependence, the work becomes a living process that sustains the possibility of the commons.The project offers not nostalgia but an active practice of collective autonomy and ontological regeneration within a commodified world.